Stop Data Creep: How CIOs Manage The Deluge
Data is growing exponentially—and it’s eating everything in sight.
Like what? Your budget, your time, your space and your energy.
The world’s volume of stored data doubles every four years. The true consequences of data creep are staggering for chief information officers (CIOs).
“If CIOs cannot figure out how to regain control over data creep, it will control them,” said Swiss Vault CEO Bhupinder Bhullar, who developed a technology to address the challenges he faced managing enormous volumes of human genome sequence data.
Surveyed IT leaders agree that cloud data storage costs continue to rise, according to Virtana’s The State of Hybrid Storage 2023. The majority (69%) said data storage now accounts for 25% of their total cloud costs, while 23% said it costs more than half of their allotted budget.
IDC Global DataSphere research found that the C-Suite ranked security and risk (68%) as their top concern. Scaling efforts to manage data to keep pace with the growing data volumes is the #1 pain point.
The survey found three barriers that are keeping organizations from leveraging the full benefits of their data:
- The volume of data is growing too fast (62% total, 65% C-level)
- There is a lack of talent to analyze the data (49% total, 47% C-level)
- Current solutions are not flexible enough (49% total, 34.8% C-level)
For decades, the market bias supported a “Cloud First” solution. Recently, the industry is pivoting to prioritize data security and controlling costs.
Most surveyed IT leaders (71%) said they plan to move workloads from the public cloud to a dedicated IT environment by 2024. Another 10% said they had already made the move into a hybrid environment, while only 13% said they plan to “run fully” in the public cloud.
In an interview about reverse cloud migrations with ComputerWeekly.com, Bharat Mistry, technical director at security supplier Trend Micro, said some organizations assume cloud providers would be responsible for cyber security. “The provider may have things like firewall services that you can use—but are they equivalent to the kind of firewall that you may have had on-premise?,” Mistry said. “Quite often, it’s rudimentary. If you haven’t done your due diligence and homework properly, you have to bolster it with some else on top.”
David S. Linthicum, who has authored 13 books on computing and writes for InfoWorld, said the public cloud is not necessarily the correct choice for organizations that have multi-petabytes of data.
“Public cloud platforms are not the most cost-effective choice for all application processing and data storage,” Linthicum wrote is a recent opinion piece for InfoWorld. “For instance, let’s say you deal with a massive storage need, such as petabytes of unstructured data. In those cases, cloud-based storage may not be as cost-effective as more traditional solutions. Indeed, it’s not uncommon for cloud-based options to cost twice as much for usage, without even considering migration expenses.”
But simply moving data back on-premises won’t stop data creep either!
Managing Data Deluge: Swiss Vault
Swiss Vault offers a unique data-storage platform for customers that demand mission-critical computing. The company, based in Princeton, New Jersey, helps organizations manage petabytes in data demanding fields. Institutes in medical genomics and weather modeling, using earth telemetry data, collect Terabytes of data per day. These institutions need to implement strategies to rapidly capture, store, access and retrieve large volumes of data for research.
Swiss Vault’s hardware-software system helps CIOs sustain operations by protecting their budget, time and limited resources. Consider these 5 benefits of Swiss Vault’s unique solution that counter ongoing data creep worldwide:
- Reduce Data Storage Costs
- Upgrade Security
- Improve On-Demand Data
- Reduce Headaches
- Save Resources
To counter data creep, one needs to reduce the space and costs required to manage data. Swiss Vault’s data file system reduces the volume of data storage up to 50%. The software automatically backs up and distributes data across the network to increase resiliency and high availability. In addition, the software features a self-healing ability that stretches the useful life of servers, extending the utility from the typical 3-5-year server replacement cycle to its maximum end-of-life. The company also slashes setup and operational costs because its hardware reduces space and energy consumption, while providing archival integrity for decades.
“Our hardware-software solution, which was made for organizations that demand mission-critical computing, shifts the power back to IT leaders so they can have their budgets back,” Bhullar said.
Next to the budget, security and compliance are top for CIOs as they manage the deluge of data. Swiss Vault’s proprietary system uses a unique version of erasure coding. The software distributes data in the network and distributes fragments onto different servers. When users call the files, the network instantaneously organizes it into its original form. And if simultaneous loss of a node occurs, or worse a server is stolen, the system will automatically rebuild the loss data chunks from existing fragmented files.
Swiss Vault is part of the burgeoning edge-networking revolution that puts data where it’s needed when it’s need. Unlike infrastructures that rely on a centralized public cloud in another continent, edge networking brings faster computing and data storage closer to a user’s devices where the data is gathered in real time. In addition to reducing latency issues, companies can cut costs when the processing is done locally, which eliminates fees to a centralized or public-cloud location.
Building out edge networking puts Swiss Vault at the forefront of an era where data is faster, more secure and less expensive. Such a winning combination allows the company to help foster innovation in several growing industries.
For health care companies, Swiss Vault can build the edge network to leverage sensors with Near Field communications (NFC) that would enable imaging, diagnostics and even smart wound care.
In the new world of agriculture, Swiss Vault is part of a large consortia that will help parts of the planet grow more food faster with the help from Edge technology. The company will build the edge network for sensor data capture, analysis and storage for machine learning and AI.
Managing data, even in a hybrid environment, requires talented staff to respond to everyday emergencies. Failed disks and servers need to be replaced. File corruption, like bitrot, happens.
But Swiss Vault’s software was built to alleviate these headaches and reduce the intensive level of support required to run an in-house data center. It automatically rebuilds data in real time when it senses lost data from failed disks or servers —without interruptions. Scanning for bit-rot files enables error correction so you never lose your data. The file-restore function moves large data onto new servers so CIOs can manage a high-performance data center with a limited staff.
From an energy perspective, Swiss Vault’s system protects a CIOs budget amid the era of data creep.
First, the company’s software defined data storage reduces the data volume to manage while increasing the data resiliency. For example, say you need to store a 1 PB file with redundancy and high resiliency. A typical RAID file management configuration over 3 data centers would result in 3 PBs of data under management. Total resources required are 3X the energy, 3x the equipment, and 3x the personnel.
Swiss Vault’s data storage software reduces the data overhead by more than 50%, while increasing the data resiliency. For example, one can set-up a configuration with 1.2PB and obtain the same level of robustness and resiliency as with RAID – saving 60% of overhead in comparison.
It’s impressive when you compare it to traditional 1PB RAID file management configurations with two backup servers would require 3PB’s of hardware and infrastructure. The realized lower disk volume also reduces energy costs per PB of data under management.
“Data creep is quickly becoming a global challenge for organizations that need to support life-advancing innovation in a secure, cost-effective manner,” Bhullar said. “Despite overwhelming volumes of data, we have a game-changing technology that will fortify the new face of progress in every corner of the world.”
For more solutions to fight data creep, contact Swiss Vault today.